SpaceX's Public Debut Makes Musk the First Trillionaire and Tests an AI-Era IPO Wave

SpaceX completed its initial public offering on June 12, priced at $135 a share and raising roughly $75 billion. The stock then climbed about 18 percent to $159, lifting the company's value above $2 trillion and pushing Elon Musk's net worth to an estimated $1.1 trillion, which Al Jazeera reported made him the world's first trillionaire.

The valuation is well ahead of the company's reported financial results. SpaceX posted a loss of nearly $5 billion last year, and its Starlink satellite-internet unit accounts for as much as 80 percent of revenue. Writing from India, The Hindu framed the listing as the normalization of an idea that value follows whoever can assert it, a sharply critical reading of the milestone.

The debut is the first of a broader series of major technology listings, with the artificial-intelligence laboratories OpenAI and Anthropic also moving toward public markets. From an Austrian-economics perspective, valuations this far above current earnings are a classic sign of abundant credit and elevated risk appetite, the conditions under which capital is most prone to misallocation.